M216 House at Kilmacolm

The commission for a house at Kilmacolm
may have come about as a result of Honeyman, Keppie & Mackintosh's completion of
Dunottar in the village in December 1901.
This was just a few months after Mackintosh's nearby Windyhill – a private commission – was
finished. The drawings are not inscribed with the name of the practice, but
they are inscribed with the office address at 140 Bath Street, Glasgow. It is
not known who commissioned the design. What may be the client's monogram
appears below the oriel window on the E. gable, but it is indecipherable. The
footprint does not appear to correspond with any house in Kilmacolm shown on
the revised O.S. map published in 1913, and it therefore seems likely that it
was not built. 1

The crow-stepped gables,
conical roofed stair turret and gabled dormer with thistle finial are all
derived from Scottish architecture of the 17th century, and the design has been
described by David Walker as being 'rather in the Franco-Scots style of
[William] Leiper'. 2 This use of historical
sources harks back to buildings of the 1890s by John Honeyman & Keppie on which Mackintosh
worked. The depressed ogee over the front door is
familiar from the Glasgow Herald
building, Martyrs' Public
School and Queen Margaret College Anatomy
Department, and this feature was still being used by the practice
as late as 1904 at 309–313 Sauchiehall
Street.

The drawings are not signed, but they appear to be
in Mackintosh's hand, and the fact that they remained in his possession at his
death tends to confirm that he was responsible for the design. By 1902, at
Windyhill and The Hill House, he had
moved decisively away from such overt historicism, but writing in 1905 to F. J. Shand about
Auchinibert, he expressed his willingness
to design in whatever historical style the client wanted. 3

3: The Hunterian, University of Glasgow: letter from Mackintosh to
F. J. Shand, 15 September 1905, GLAHA 55480.

'Mackintosh Architecture' led by The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council; with additional support from The Monument Trust, The Pilgrim Trust, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; and collaborative input from Historic Scotland and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland.